Strategic Communication in Higher Ed: Think Like a Marketer

One of the challenges higher educational institutions face is engaging students in the events and activities that take place on campus. It’s equally important for universities to demonstrate that their students’ performance, safety, health, and well-being are top priority. A college campus is a community; for it to thrive, its citizens need to be informed of its goings-on regularly—and repeatedly. A solid communication strategy is crucial in making this happen.

But in an era when everyone is confronted with too many messages and even more noise, how can universities communicate with their students effectively? What’s the winning strategy for delivering information that students will see, hear—and act on?

We think the better question is: what if we approached campus communications like a marketing campaign?

Good marketers don’t create content, disseminate it, and hope that it receives a reaction. They don’t develop blanket messaging for the masses—even those for whom the message is completely irrelevant. They don’t send their message once and assume that everybody has received it. Because their primary goal is for their content to have an impact, a good marketer knows their audience. And based on this knowledge, they find the best way to reach it.

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Define Your Communication Goals

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In higher ed, the over-arching goal is to drive great student outcomes. Communications play a significant role in this; when people know what’s going on at their university—and that their school cares about them—they’re likely to be more engaged. Technology can be a significant enabler of good campus communications. But only if those creating the content have defined what they want to achieve.

A question to consider: what will you be communicating?

• Is it welcome messaging for first-year students to help them navigate their new environment?
• Are you focusing on how to keep students safe?
• Or do you wish to develop messaging that’s targeting visitors to the campus in the interest of recruiting them, eventually, as students?

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Know Your Audience

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A college campus is home to a number of different audiences, including faculty, staff, and visitors. Then, of course, there are the students—and they can be divided into a wide variety of sub-groups according to their program focus, extracurricular activities, and community involvement. Good marketers would tailor their messaging to reach each of these demographics slightly differently. When crafting content, they’d ask:

• Who are you communicating to? Instructors? Staff? Art students? Athletics teams?
  

• How will you reach them? Dedicated digital signage? Their mobile devices? Both?
  

• What’s the best way to communicate this specific message? Would a short video be most effective, or is a combination of graphics and text the better choice?
  

• How does your target demographic prefer to consume content? For example, do instructors and students absorb information differently? Does one group favor email, while another prefers texts?
  

• What communication channels will you prioritize? This could include a combination of digital signage, direct messaging, email, print, social media, and websites.

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Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

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People need to see a message at least seven times before they take notice. For example, if you run messaging on student registration dates for a couple of days and then stop, chances are much of your audience will have missed it. Instead, this content should be featured regularly, for a reasonable period, so that your intended demographic can digest it. At the same time, it’s important to ensure that communications don’t become stale. When people see the same messaging for weeks on end, they’re likely to disregard all content entirely.

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Measure Engagement

Good marketers track how successful their campaigns are. When they discern that people aren’t engaging with their content, they ask themselves:

• Is there a problem with the content itself? Is it not providing good information? The correct information? Is it too information-heavy?
• Have we delivered it to the right locations and devices? Have we made an error in targeting our audience? (For example, if the content is directed at parents rather than students, it’s probably wiser to deliver messaging directly to their mobile phones rather than to the dedicated digital displays that reside on campus.)
• Have we repeated the messaging sufficiently?

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Location. Location. Location. (And: Target. Target. Target.)

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Today’s hybrid world requires us to evolve our digital signage communications to reach people where they’re at, when they are there. For example, brief messaging that welcomes visiting football teams is suitable for delivery on dedicated signage in the campus locker rooms. But event information for business students who often attend lectures remotely should be distributed to displays in the classroom as well as to students’ mobile devices.

Apart from emergency messages (which should go to everyone), it’s also necessary to target content delivery. Once again, we’re all overburdened by messaging and noise and tend to dismiss content that comes from the noisiest of sources. Those business students are probably interested to know that their campus is hosting a talk with a famous Fortune 100 CEO. But will those same students find a seminar on the history of audio recording relevant to their studies? When content is targeted at those who need it most, it’s more meaningful.

When students can not only learn about that CEO’s talk, but register for it—via their mobile device, on the spot—you’ve not just succeeded in engaging them with your content. You’ve also driven them to participate in campus activities.

At Carousel, we have the tools to make this possible. Carousel Cloud streamlines content creation, management and delivery to dedicated displays. With The Daily, content administrators may push bulletins—on a targeted basis—to mobile devices. The Daily feeds can be configured for mobile device management (MDM) thanks to our partnership with Jamf. People may also access The Daily bulletins via web links or QR codes.

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As a technology company, we do not promote investing in tech for tech’s sake. Instead, we encourage higher educational institutions to approach their communications strategically by pausing to define their goals and know their audiences. Only then are they well-positioned to select the tools that will help them achieve what they’re setting out to do.